Before the war Forrest amassed substantial wealth as a cotton planter, horse and cattle trader, real estate broker, and slave trader. He was one of the few officers on either side during the war to enlist as a private and be promoted to general officer and corps commander without any military education or training. An expert cavalry leader, Forrest eventually was given command of a corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle".[3] Union General William Tecumseh Sherman called him "that devil Forrest" in wartime communications with Ulysses S. Grant and considered him "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side".[4] Grant himself described Forrest as "a brave and intrepid cavalry general" while noting that Forrest sent a dispatch on the Fort Pillow Massacre "in which he left out the part which shocks humanity to read."[5] Forrest is considered one of the Civil War's most brilliant tacticians by the historian Spencer C. Tucker.[6]

Forrest fought by simple rules: he maintained, "[W]ar means fighting and fighting means killing" and the way to win was "to get there first with the most men".[7] His cavalry secured more Union guns, horses, and supplies than any other single Confederate unit. He played pivotal roles at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, the capture of Murfreesboro, the Franklin-Nashville campaign, Brice's Crossroads, and in the pursuit and capture of Colonel Abel Streight's Raiders.[8] His methods subsequently influenced many future generations of military strategists, although the Confederate high command failed to fully utilize his talents until it was too late to win the war.[9]

In what has been called "one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history,"[10] troops under Forrest's command massacred Union troops who had surrendered, most of them black soldiers, along with some white Southerners (Tennesseans) fighting for the Union, at the Battle of Fort Pillow. Forrest was blamed for the massacre in the Union press, and the news of it had a significant effect on Northern morale. The consensus of recent historians is that Forrest did not order the massacre; after multiple investigations he was not charged with a crime nor dereliction of duty. It was, however, the South's publicly stated position that slaves firing on whites would be killed on the spot, along with Southern whites that fought for the Union, whom the Confederacy considered traitors.[11] According to this analysis, Forrest's troops were carrying out Confederate policy, and were simply obeying orders. By his inaction Forrest showed that he felt no compunction to stop the slaughter, and his repeated later denials that he knew a massacre was taking place, or even that a massacre had occurred at all, are not credible. Consequently, despite this isolated incident in his otherwise distinguished career as a general, his role in it was a stigmatizing one for him the rest of his life, both professionally and personally,[12][13] and contributed to his business problems after the war. He unsuccessfully sought a pardon from President Andrew Johnson.[14] (Just what he sought a pardon for is unclear.) He never could escape the Northern label of "Butcher of Fort Pillow".[15]

Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan, apparently in 1867, two years after its founding, and was elected its first Grand Wizard.[16][17] At the time the group was a loose collection of local groups that used violence and the threat of violence to maintain white control over the newly liberated and enfranchised slaves.[18][19] He soon became disillusioned with the lack of discipline among the various white supremacist groups across the South, ordered the dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan[20] and its costumes to be destroyed,[21] and withdrew from the organization. Without any coordinated leadership, the Klan gradually disappeared. Forty years later, however, Thomas Dixon Jr. created a sanitized, romanticized version of the "first Klan" in his book, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), inspiring the longest and most successful motion picture ever made up to that time: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was especially popular in the South,[22] and in turn brought the rebirth of a more organized and longer-lasting "second Klan".

In the last years of his life, Forrest publicly denounced the violence and racism practiced by the Klan, insisted he had never been a member, and made repeated public speeches in favor of racial harmony.[23]

Contents

Nathan Bedford Forrest was born in 1821 to a poor settler family in a secluded frontier cabin near Chapel Hill hamlet, then part of Bedford County, Tennessee, but now encompassed in Marshall County.[24] His father was of English descent, and most of his biographers state that his mother was of Scotch-Irish descent, but the Memphis Genealogical Society says that she was of English descent as well.[25] He and his twin sister, Fanny, were the two eldest of blacksmith William Forrest's 12 children with wife Miriam Beck. The Forrest family had migrated to Tennessee from Virginia via North Carolina during the second half of the 18th century, while the Beck family had moved from South Carolina to Tennessee around the same time.[26] They lived in a log house (now preserved as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home) from 1830 to 1833.[27]John Allan Wyeth, who served in an Alabama regiment under Forrest, described it as a one-room building with a loft and no windows.[28] After the deaths of his father and Fanny to scarlet fever, Forrest became head of the family at age 17.

In 1841, Forrest went into business with his uncle Jonathan Forrest in Hernando, Mississippi. His uncle was killed there in 1845 during an argument with the Matlock brothers. In retaliation, Forrest shot and killed two of them with his two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a knife which had been thrown to him. One of the wounded Matlock men survived and served under Forrest during the Civil War.[29]

Forrest became a successful businessman, planter, and slaveholder, and acquired several cottonplantations in the Delta region of West Tennessee. He was also a slave trader, at a time when demand was booming in the Deep South; his trading business was based on Adams Street in Memphis,[30] and allowed him to support his mother and put his younger brothers through college.[31] In 1858, Forrest was elected a Memphis city alderman as a Democrat and served two consecutive terms.[32][33] By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, he had become a millionaire and one of the richest men in the South, having amassed a "personal fortune that he claimed was worth $1.5 million".[34]

Forrest was well known as a Memphis speculator and Mississippi gambler.[35] As his fortune increased, he engaged in plantation speculation and became the nominal owner of two plantations not far from Goodrich's Landing, above Vicksburg, where he worked some hundred or more slaves. His obituary would say that "he was known to his acquaintances as a man of obscure origin and low associations, a shrewd speculator, negro trader, and duelist, but a man of great energy and brute courage".[36]

Forrest had 12 brothers and sisters; two of his eight brothers and his three sisters died of typhoid fever at an early age, all at about the same time.[37][38] He also contracted the disease, but survived; his father recovered but died from residual effects of the disease five years later, when Bedford was 16. His mother Miriam then married James Horatio Luxton, of Marshall, Texas, in 1843 and gave birth to four more children.[39]

In 1845, Forrest married Mary Ann Montgomery (1826–1893), the niece of a Presbyterian minister who was her legal guardian.[40] They had two children, William Montgomery Bedford Forrest (1846–1908), who enlisted at the age of 15 and served alongside his father in the war, and a daughter, Fanny (1849–1854), who died in childhood. His descendants continued the military tradition. A grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest II (1872–1931), became commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans[41] and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and secretary of the national organization.[42] A great-grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest III (1905–1943), graduated from West Point and rose to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army Air Corps; he was killed during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany in 1943, becoming the first American general to die in European combat in World War II.[43]

After the Civil War broke out, Forrest returned to Tennessee from his Mississippi ventures and enlisted in the Confederate States Army (CSA) on June 14, 1861; he reported for training at Fort Wright near Randolph, Tennessee,[44] joining Captain Josiah White's cavalry company, the Tennessee Mounted Rifles (Seventh Tennessee Cavalry), as a private along with his youngest brother and 15-year-old son. Upon seeing how badly equipped the CSA was, Forrest offered to buy horses and equipment with his own money for a regiment of Tennessee volunteer soldiers.[31][45]

His superior officers and Governor of TennesseeIsham G. Harris were surprised that someone of Forrest's wealth and prominence had enlisted as a soldier, especially since major planters were exempted from service. They commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to recruit and train a battalion of Confederate mounted rangers.[46] In October 1861, Forrest was given command of a regiment, the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry. Though Forrest had no prior formal military training or experience, he had exhibited leadership and soon proved he had a gift for successful tactics.[47]

Public debate surrounded Tennessee's decision to join the Confederacy, and both the Confederate and Union armies recruited soldiers from the state. More than 100,000 men from Tennessee served with the Confederacy, and over 31,000 served with the Union.[48] Forrest posted advertisements to join his regiment, with the slogan, "Let's have some fun and kill some Yankees!".[49] Forrest's command included his Escort Company (his "Special Forces"), for which he selected the best soldiers available. This unit, which varied in size from 40 to 90 men, constituted the elite of his cavalry.[50]

At six feet two inches (1.88 m) in height and about 180 pounds (13 st; 82 kg),[51][52][53][47] Forrest was physically imposing, especially compared to the average height of men at the time.[54] He used his skills as a hard rider and fierce swordsman to great effect; he was known to sharpen both the top and bottom edges of his heavy saber.[55] Forrest killed thirty enemy soldiers in hand-to hand combat.[56]

Not all of Forrest's feats of individual combat involved enemy troops. Lieutenant Andrew Wills Gould, an artillery officer in Forrest's command, was being transferred, presumably because cannons under his command[57] were spiked (disabled) by the enemy[58] during the Battle of Day's Gap. On June 13, 1863, Gould confronted Forrest about his transfer, which escalated into a violent exchange.[59] Gould shot Forrest in the hip, and Forrest mortally stabbed Gould.[60]

A few days after the Confederate surrender of Fort Donelson, with the fall of Nashville to Union forces imminent, Forrest took command of the city. All available carts and wagons were impressed into service to haul six hundred boxes of army clothing, 250,000 pounds of bacon and forty wagon-loads of ammunition to the railroad depots to be sent off to Chattanooga and Decatur.[64][65] Forrest arranged for the heavy ordnance machinery, including a new cannon rifling machine and fourteen cannons built at Brennan's machine shop, as well as parts from the Nashville Armory, to be sent to Atlanta for use by the Confederate Army,[66] while the governor and legislature departed hastily for Memphis.[67][68]

A month later, Forrest was back in action at the Battle of Shiloh, fought April 6–7, 1862. He commanded a Confederate rear guard after the Union victory. In the battle of Fallen Timbers, he drove through the Union skirmish line. Not realizing that the rest of his men had halted their charge when reaching the full Union brigade, Forrest charged the brigade alone and soon found himself surrounded. He emptied his Colt Army revolvers into the swirling mass of Union soldiers and pulled out his saber, hacking and slashing. A Union infantryman on the ground beside Forrest fired a musket ball at him with a point-blank shot, nearly knocking him out of the saddle. The ball went through Forrest's pelvis and lodged near his spine. A surgeon removed the musket ball a week later, without anesthesia, which was unavailable.[37]

By early summer, Forrest commanded a new brigade of "green" cavalry regiments. In July, he led them into Middle Tennessee under orders to launch a cavalry raid, and on July 13, 1862, led them into the First Battle of Murfreesboro, as a result of which all of the Union units surrendered to Forrest, and the Confederates destroyed much of the Union's supplies and railroad track in the area.[69]

Promoted on July 21, 1862 to brigadier general, Forrest was given command of a Confederate cavalry brigade.[70] In December 1862, Forrest's veteran troopers were reassigned by General Braxton Bragg to another officer, against his protest. Forrest had to recruit a new brigade, composed of about 2,000 inexperienced recruits, most of whom lacked weapons.[71] Again, Bragg ordered a series of raids, this time into west Tennessee, to disrupt the communications of the Union forces under Grant, which were threatening the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Forrest protested that to send such untrained men behind enemy lines was suicidal, but Bragg insisted, and Forrest obeyed his orders. In the ensuing raids he led thousands of Union soldiers in west Tennessee on a "wild goose chase" to try to locate his fast-moving forces. Never staying in one place long enough to be attacked, Forrest led his troops in raids as far north as the banks of the Ohio River in southwest Kentucky.[72] He returned to his base in Mississippi with more men than he had started with. By then, all were fully armed with captured Union weapons. As a result, Grant was forced to revise and delay the strategy of his Vicksburg campaign. Newspaper correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader, who traveled with Grant for three years during his campaigns, wrote that Forrest "was the only Confederate cavalryman of whom Grant stood in much dread".[73][74]

Forrest as a Confederate general

The Union Army gained military control of Tennessee in 1862 and occupied it for the duration of the war, having taken control of strategic cities and railroads. Forrest continued to lead his men in small-scale operations until April 1863. The Confederate army dispatched him with a small force into the backcountry of northern Alabama and west Georgia to defend against an attack of 3,000 Union cavalrymen commanded by Colonel Abel Streight. Streight had orders to cut the Confederate railroad south of Chattanooga, Tennessee to cut off Bragg's supply line and force him to retreat into Georgia.[75] Forrest chased Streight's men for 16 days, harassing them all the way. Streight's goal changed from dismantling the railroad to escaping the pursuit. On May 3, Forrest caught up with Streight's unit east of Cedar Bluff, Alabama. Forrest had fewer men than the Union side, but he repeatedly paraded some of them around a hilltop to appear a larger force, and convinced Streight to surrender his 1,500 or so exhausted troops (historians Kevin Dougherty and Keith S. Hebert say he had about 1,700 men).[76][77][78]

Forrest served with the main army at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 18–20, 1863. He pursued the retreating Union army and took hundreds of prisoners.[79] Like several others under Bragg's command, he urged an immediate follow-up attack to recapture Chattanooga, which had fallen a few weeks before. Bragg failed to do so, upon which Forrest was quoted as saying, "What does he fight battles for?"[80][81] The story that Forrest confronted and threatened the life of Bragg in the fall of 1863, following the battle of Chickamauga, and that Bragg transferred Forrest to command in Mississippi as a direct result, is now considered to be apocryphal.[82][83]

On December 4, 1863, Forrest was promoted to the rank of major general.[84] On March 25, 1864, Forrest's cavalry raided the town of Paducah, Kentucky in the Battle of Paducah, during which Forrest demanded the surrender of U.S. Colonel Stephen G. Hicks: "... if I have to storm your works, you may expect no quarter." The bluff failed and Hicks refused.[85]

On April 12, 1864, General Forrest led his forces in the attack and capture of Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee, on the Mississippi River. A controversy soon arose about whether Forrest conducted or condoned a massacre of the negro soldiers, white Tennessee Unionists, and Confederate deserters who had surrendered there. Only 90 out of approximately 262 U.S. Colored Troops survived the battle; casualties were also high among white defenders of the fort, with 205 out of about 500 surviving.

There are conflicting reports about what occurred at Fort Pillow. Forrest's Confederate forces were accused of subjecting captured soldiers to brutality, with allegations that some were burned to death. Forrest's men were alleged to have set fire to a Union barracks with wounded Union soldiers inside; however, the report of Union Lieutenant Daniel Van Horn said that act was due to orders carried out by Union Lieutenant John D. Hill. Van Horn also reported that, "There never was a surrender of the fort, both officers and men declaring they never would surrender or ask for quarter".[86] Reports filed by Union Captain Goodman corroborated this perspective, stating that Union forces never surrendered; he said it was agreed that if the fort was surrendered, the whole garrison, white and black, would be treated as prisoners of war. Forrest sent additional communiques to Major Lionel F. Booth demanding total surrender, but Major Booth had been fatally shot in the battle and the command of Fort Pillow had already been assumed by Major William F. Bradford. The delayed reply to Forrest's demands bore the name of Major Booth, asking for more time to decide about surrendering the fort and the gunboat Olive Branch. Forrest replied that the gunboat was not expected to be surrendered, but the fort alone. Hours later during the truce, after many communiques, the Union sent their answer, "a brief but positive refusal to capitulate".[87]

Forrest's men insisted that the Union soldiers, although fleeing, kept their weapons and frequently turned to shoot, forcing the Confederates to keep firing in self-defense.[88] Confederates said the Union flag was still flying over the fort, which indicated that the force had not formally surrendered. A contemporary newspaper account from Jackson, Tennessee stated that "General Forrest begged them to surrender", but "not the first sign of surrender was ever given". Similar accounts were reported in many Southern newspapers at the time.[89] These statements, however, were contradicted by Union survivors, as well as the letter of a Confederate soldier who graphically recounted a massacre. Achilles Clark, a soldier with the 20th Tennessee cavalry, wrote to his sisters immediately after the battle:

The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity.[90][91][92]

Following the cessation of hostilities, Forrest transferred the 14 most seriously wounded United States Colored Troops (USCT) to the U.S. steamer Silver Cloud.[93] He sent 39 USCT soldiers taken as prisoners to higher command.[citation needed] President Abraham Lincoln asked his cabinet for opinions as to how the Union should respond to the massacre.[94] General Sherman headed an investigation into the massacre and the extent of Forrest's culpability for it.[95]

At the time of the massacre, General Grant was no longer in Tennessee but had transferred to the east to command all Union troops. He wrote in his memoirs that Forrest in his report of the battle had "left out the part which shocks humanity to read."[96]

After Forrest's death, The New York Times reported that "General Bedford Forrest, the great Confederate cavalry officer, died at 7:30 o'clock this evening at the residence of his brother, Colonel Jesse Forrest", but also reported that it would not be for military victories that Forrest would pass into history.[97] Forrest's claims that the massacre was an invention of northern reporters were directly disputed in letters written by Confederate soldiers to their own families, which described wanton brutality on the part of Confederate troops.[92] The New York newspaper obituary stated:

Since the war, Forrest has lived at Memphis, and his principal occupation seems to have been to try and explain away the Fort Pillow affair. He wrote several letters about it, which were published, and always had something to say about it in any public speech he delivered. He seemed as if he were trying always to rub away the blood stains which marked him.[97]

Historians have differed in their interpretations of the events at Fort Pillow. Richard Fuchs, author of An Unerring Fire, concluded:

The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct – intentional murder – for the vilest of reasons – racism and personal enmity.[98]

Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place... it certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word.[99]

John Cimprich states:

The new paradigm in social attitudes and the fuller use of available evidence has favored a massacre interpretation... Debate over the memory of this incident formed a part of sectional and racial conflicts for many years after the war, but the reinterpretation of the event during the last thirty years offers some hope that society can move beyond past intolerance.[100]

Forrest's greatest victory came on June 10, 1864, when his 3,500-man force clashed with 8,500 men commanded by Union Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads in northeastern Mississippi. Here, the mobility of troops under his command his and superior tactics led to victory, and the outcome swept Union forces from a large expanse of southwest Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Forrest set up a position for an attack to repulse a pursuing force commanded by Sturgis, who had been sent to impede Forrest from destroying Union supplies and fortifications. When Sturgis's Federal army came upon the crossroads, they collided with Forrest's cavalry.[101] Sturgis ordered his infantry to advance to the front line to counteract the cavalry. The infantry, tired and weary and suffering under the heat, were quickly broken and sent into mass retreat. Forrest sent a full charge after the retreating army and captured 16 artillery pieces, 176 wagons, and 1,500 stands of small arms. In all, the maneuver cost Forrest 96 men killed and 396 wounded. The day was worse for Union troops, which suffered 223 killed, 394 wounded, and 1,623 missing. The losses were a deep blow to the black regiment under Sturgis's command. In the hasty retreat, they stripped off commemorative badges that read "Remember Fort Pillow" to avoid goading the Confederate force pursuing them.[102]

One month later, while serving under General Stephen D. Lee, Forrest experienced tactical defeat at the Battle of Tupelo in 1864. Concerned about Union supply lines, Maj. Gen. Sherman sent a force under the command of Maj. Gen. Andrew J. Smith to deal with Forrest. Union forces drove the Confederates from the field and Forrest was wounded in the foot, but his forces were not wholly destroyed.[103] He continued to oppose Union efforts in the West for the remainder of the war.

After his bloody defeat at Franklin, Hood continued to Nashville. Hood ordered Forrest to conduct an independent raid against the Murfreesborogarrison. After success in achieving the objectives specified by Hood, Forrest engaged Union forces near Murfreesboro on December 5, 1864. In what would be known as the Third Battle of Murfreesboro, a portion of Forrest's command broke and ran. After Hood's Army of Tennessee was all but destroyed at the Battle of Nashville, Forrest distinguished himself by commanding the Confederate rear guard in a series of actions that allowed what was left of the army to escape. For this, he would later be promoted to the rank of lieutenant general on March 2, 1865. A portion of his command, now dismounted, was surprised and captured in their camp at Verona, Mississippi on December 25, 1864, during a raid of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad by a brigade of Brig. Gen. Benjamin Grierson's cavalry division.

In the spring of 1865, Forrest led an unsuccessful defense of the state of Alabama against Wilson's Raid. His opponent, Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson, defeated Forrest at the Battle of Selma on April 2, 1865. A week later, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia. When he received news of Lee's surrender, Forrest also chose to surrender. On May 9, 1865, at Gainesville, Forrest read his farewell address to the men under his command.

Forrest became well known for his early use of maneuver tactics as applied to a mobile horse cavalry deployment.[105] He grasped the doctrines of mobile warfare[106] that would eventually become prevalent in the 20th century. Paramount in his strategy was fast movement, even if it meant pushing his horses at a killing pace, to constantly harass his enemy during raids and disrupt supply trains and enemy communications by destroying railroad tracks and cutting telegraph lines, as he wheeled around his opponent's flank. Noted Civil War scholar Bruce Catton writes:

Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry.[107]

Forrest is often erroneously quoted as saying his strategy was to "git thar fustest with the mostest". Now often recast as "Getting there firstest with the mostest",[108] this misquote first appeared in a New York Tribune article written to provide colorful comments in reaction to European interest in Civil War generals. The aphorism was addressed and corrected as "Ma'am, I got there first with the most men" by a New York Times story in 1918.[109] Though a novel and succinct condensation of the military principles of mass and maneuver, Bruce Catton writes:

Do not, under any circumstances whatever, quote Forrest as saying 'fustest' and 'mostest'. He did not say it that way, and nobody who knows anything about him imagines that he did.[110]

With slavery abolished after the war, Forrest suffered a major financial setback as a former slave trader. He became interested in the area around Crowley's Ridge during the war and settled in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1866, Forrest and C.C. McCreanor contracted to finish the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad. He built a commissary in a town forming along the rail route, which most residents were calling "Forrest's Town" and was incorporated as Forrest City, Arkansas in 1870.

He later found employment at the Selma-based Marion & Memphis Railroad and eventually became the company president. He was not as successful in railroad promoting as in war, and under his direction, the company went bankrupt. Nearly ruined as the result of the failure of the Marion & Memphis, Forrest spent his final days running a prison work farm on President's Island in the Mississippi River. Forrest's health was in steady decline. He and his wife lived in a log cabin they had salvaged from his plantation.

During the Virginius Affair of 1873, some of Forrest's old Southern friends were filibusters aboard the vessel so he wrote a letter to then General-in-Chief of the United States Army William T. Sherman and offered his services in case of war with Spain. Sherman, who in the Civil War had recognized what a deadly foe Forrest was, replied after the crisis settled down. He thanked Forrest for the offer and stated that had war broken out, he would have considered it an honor to have served side-by-side with him.[112]

Forrest was an early member of the Ku Klux Klan ("KKK" or simply "the Klan"), which was formed by six veterans of the Confederate Army in Pulaski, Tennessee during the spring of 1866,[113][114][115] and soon expanded throughout the state and beyond. Forrest became involved sometime in late 1866 or early 1867. A common report is that Forrest arrived in Nashville in April 1867 while the Klan was meeting at the Maxwell House Hotel, probably at the encouragement of a state Klan leader, former Confederate general George Gordon.[116] The organization had grown to the point where an experienced commander was needed, and Forrest was well-suited to the role. In Room 10 of the Maxwell, Forrest was sworn in as a member by John W. Morton.[117][118] Brian Steel Wills quotes two KKK members who identified Forrest as a Klan leader.[119] James R. Crowe stated, "After the order grew to large numbers we found it necessary to have someone of large experience to command. We chose General Forrest".[120] Another member wrote, "N. B. Forest of Confederate fame was at our head, and was known as the Grand Wizard. I heard him make a speech in one of our Dens".[119] The title "Grand Wizard" was chosen because General Forrest had been known as "The Wizard of the Saddle" during the war.[121] According to Jack Hurst's 1993 biography, "Two years after Appomattox, Forrest was reincarnated as grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. As the Klan's first national leader, he became the Lost Cause's avenging angel, galvanizing a loose collection of boyish secret social clubs into a reactionary instrument of terror still feared today."[122]

Following the war, the United States Congress began passing the Reconstruction Acts to lay out requirements for the former Confederate States to be readmitted to the Union,[123][124][125] to include ratification of the Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the United States Constitution. The fourteenth addressed citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws for former slaves, while the fifteenth specifically secured the voting rights of black men.[126] According to Wills, in the August 1867 state elections the Klan was relatively restrained in its actions. White Americans who made up the KKK hoped to persuade black voters that a return to their pre-war state of bondage was in their best interest. Forrest assisted in maintaining order. It was after these efforts failed that Klan violence and intimidation escalated and became widespread.[127] Author Andrew Ward, however, writes, "In the spring of 1867, Forrest and his dragoons launched a campaign of midnight parades; 'ghost' masquerades; and 'whipping' and even 'killing Negro voters and white Republicans, to scare blacks off voting and running for office'".[128]

In an 1868 interview by a Cincinnati newspaper, Forrest claimed that the Klan had 40,000 members in Tennessee and 550,000 total members throughout the Southern states. He said he sympathized with them, but denied any formal connection. He claimed he could muster thousands of men himself. He described the Klan as "a protective political military organization... The members are sworn to recognize the government of the United States... Its objects originally were protection against Loyal Leagues and the Grand Army of the Republic..." After only a year as Grand Wizard, in January 1869, faced with an ungovernable membership employing methods that seemed increasingly counterproductive, Forrest dissolved the Klan, ordered their costumes destroyed",[129] and withdrew from participation. His declaration had little effect, however, and few Klansmen destroyed their robes and hoods.[130]

After the lynch mob murder of four blacks, arrested for defending themselves at a barbecue, Forrest wrote to Tennessee Governor John C. Brown in August 1874 and "volunteered to help ‘exterminate’ those men responsible for the continued violence against the blacks", offering "to exterminate the white marauders who disgrace their race by this cowardly murder of Negroes".[131]

Forrest testified before the Congressional investigation on Klan activities on June 27, 1871. Forrest denied membership, but his individual role in the KKK was beyond the scope of the investigating committee, which wrote, "our design is not to connect General Forrest with this order, (the reader may form his own conclusion upon this question... .[132] The committee also noted, "The natural tendency of all such organizations is to violence and crime; hence it was that General Forrest and other men of influence in the state, by the exercise of their moral power, induced them to disband".[133]

On July 5, 1875, Forrest demonstrated that his personal sentiments on the issue of race now differed from those of the Klan when he was invited to give a speech before the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, a post-war organization of black Southerners advocating to improve the economic condition of blacks and to gain equal rights for all citizens. At this, his last public appearance, he made what the New York Times described as a "friendly speech"[36] during which, when offered a bouquet of flowers by a young black woman, he accepted them, thanked her and kissed her on the cheek as a token of reconciliation between the races. Forrest ignored his critics and spoke in encouragement of black advancement and of endeavoring to be a proponent for espousing peace and harmony between black and white Americans going forward.[134]

In response to the Pole-Bearers speech, the Cavalry Survivors Association of Augusta, the first Confederate organization formed after the war, called a meeting in which Captain F. Edgeworth Eve gave a speech expressing unmitigated disapproval of Forrest's remarks promoting inter-ethnic harmony, ridiculing his faculties and judgment and berating the woman who gifted Forrest flowers as "a mulatto wench". The association voted unanimously to amend its constitution to expressly forbid publicly advocating for or hinting at any association of white women and girls as being in the same classes as "females of the negro race".[135][136] The Macon Weekly Telegraph newspaper also condemned Forrest for his speech, describing the event as "the recent disgusting exhibition of himself at the negro [sic] jamboree" and quoting part of a Charlotte Observer article, which read "We have infinitely more respect for Longstreet, who fraternizes with negro men on public occasions, with the pay for the treason to his race in his pocket, than with Forrest and [General] Pillow, who equalize with the negro women, with only 'futures' in payment".[137][138]

Forrest reportedly died from acute complications of diabetes at the Memphis home of his brother Jesse on October 29, 1877.[139] His eulogy was delivered by his recent spiritual mentor, former Confederate chaplain George Tucker Stainback, who declared in his eulogy: "Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest, though dead, yet speaketh. His acts have photographed themselves upon the hearts of thousands, and will speak there forever.[140]

Forrest was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.[141] In 1904, the remains of Forrest and his wife Mary were disinterred from Elmwood and moved to a Memphis city park which was originally named Forrest Park in his honor but has since been renamed Health Sciences Park.[142]

On July 7, 2015, the Memphis City Council unanimously voted to remove the statue of Forrest from Health Sciences Park, and to return the remains of Forrest and his wife to Elmwood Cemetery. However, the Tennessee Historical Commission invoked the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013 and U.S. Public Law 85-425: Sec. 410 to overrule the city.[143] However, as explained below, Memphis sold the park land, and the new owner (Memphis Greenspace), which was not subject to the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, immediately removed it.

Forrest was elevated in Memphis in particular—where he lived and died—to the status of folk hero. "Embarrassed by their city's early capitulation during the Civil War, white Memphians desperately needed a hero and therefore crafted a distorted depiction of Forrest's role in the war."[111] A memorial to him, the first Civil War memorial in Memphis, was erected in 1905 in a new Nathan Bedford Forrest Park. A bust sculpted by Jane Baxendale is on display at the Tennessee State Capitol building in Nashville. The World War II Army base Camp Forrest in Tullahoma, Tennessee was named after him. It is now the site of the Arnold Engineering Development Center.

A monument to Forrest in the Confederate Circle section of Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama reads "Defender of Selma, Wizard of the Saddle, Untutored Genius, The first with the most. This monument stands as testament of our perpetual devotion and respect for Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest. CSA 1821–1877, one of the South's finest heroes. In honor of Gen. Forrest's unwavering defense of Selma, the great state of Alabama, and the Confederacy, this memorial is dedicated. DEO VINDICE". As an armory for the Confederacy, Selma provided most of the South's ammunition during the Civil War. The bust of Forrest was stolen from the cemetery monument in March 2012 and efforts are currently underway to restore the monument.[146] A monument to Forrest in the Myrtle Hill Cemetery in Rome, Georgia was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to honor his bravery for saving Rome from Union Army Colonel Abel Streight and his cavalry.

In August 2000, a road on Fort Bliss named for Forrest decades earlier was renamed for former post commander Richard T. Cassidy.[149][150][151] In 2005, Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey started an effort to move the statue over Forrest's grave and rename Forrest Park. Former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who is black, blocked the move. Others have tried to get a bust of Forrest removed from the Tennessee House of Representatives chamber.[152] Leaders in other localities have also tried to remove or eliminate Forrest monuments, with mixed success.

The ROTC building at Middle Tennessee State University was named Forrest Hall in his honor. In 2006, the frieze depicting General Forrest on horseback that had adorned the side of this building was removed amid protests, but a major push to change its name failed. Also, the university's Blue Raiders' athletic mascot was changed to a pegasus from a cavalier, in order to avoid association with General Forrest.

In the 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War by Ken Burns, historian Shelby Foote states in Episode 7 that the Civil War produced two "authentic geniuses": Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. When expressing this opinion to one of General Forrest's granddaughters, she replied after a pause, "You know, we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln in my family".[153] Foote also used Forrest as a major character in his novel Shiloh, which used numerous first-person stories to illustrate a detailed timeline and account of the battle.

Forrest's legacy as "one of the most controversial – and popular – icons of the war" still draws heated public debate. A 2011 Mississippi license plate proposal to honor him, by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, revived tensions and raised objections from Mississippi chapter of the NAACP president Derrick Johnson, who compared Forrest to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.[154][155] The Mississippi NAACP petitioned Governor Haley Barbour to denounce the plates and prevent their distribution.[156] Barbour refused to denounce the honor, noting instead that the state legislature would not be likely to approve the plate anyway.[157]

In 2000, a monument to Forrest in Selma, Alabama, was unveiled.[158] On March 10, 2012, it was vandalized and the bronze bust of the general disappeared. In August, a historical society called Friends of Forrest moved forward with plans for a new, larger monument, which was to be 12 feet high, illuminated by LED lights, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and protected by 24-hour security cameras. The plans triggered outrage and a group of around 20 protesters attempted to block construction of the new monument by lying in the path of a concrete truck. Local lawyer and radio host Rose Sanders said, "Glorifying Nathan B. Forrest here is like glorifying a Nazi in Germany. For Selma, of all places, to have a big monument to a Klansman is totally unacceptable".[159] An online petition at Change.org asking the City Council to ban the monument collected more than 285,000 signatures by mid-September of the same year.

Forrest Park in Memphis was renamed Health Sciences Park in 2013, amid substantial controversy.[142] In 2015, as a result of the June 17 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, some Tennessee lawmakers advocated removing a bust of Forrest located in the state's Capitol building. Subsequently, then-Mayor A.C. Wharton urged removal of the statue of Forrest in Health Sciences Park and suggested the relocation of Forrest and his wife to their original burial site in nearby Elmwood Cemetery.[160] In a nearly unanimous vote on July 7, the Memphis City Council passed a resolution in favor of removing the statue and securing the couple's remains for transfer. The Tennessee Historical Commission denied removal on October 21, 2016 under its authority granted by the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013, which protects war memorials on public property from cities or counties relocating, removing, renaming, or otherwise disturbing them without permission.[161] On December 20, 2017, the Memphis City Council voted to sell Health Science Park to a new non-profit, Memphis Greenspace, and, since the non-profit was not subject to the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, the statue was removed that evening.[162][163] The Sons of Confederate Veterans say they will sue the city.[164])

^Ansearchin' News. Memphis Genealogical Society. 1996. p. 39. It is time to publish the truth about Miriam Beck Forrest and her family. They were of English origin and came from Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Miriam's parents, John Emasy Beck and his wife, Frances Watts, were among the earlier settlers of Bedford Co., Tenm. John Emasy's grandfather was Jeffrey Beck, who was born in Bucks Co., Pa., to Edward and Sarah Beck and moved via Virginia to North Carolina.

^John Allan Wyeth (1989). That Devil Forrest: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (Reprint, originally published 1959 ed.). LSU Press. p. 1. ISBN978-0-8071-1578-7. The cabin, which was his mother's home, claimed no more than eighteen by twenty feet of earth to rest upon, with a single room below and half-room or loft overhead. One end of this building was almost entirely given up to the broad fireplace, while near the middle of each side swung, on wooden hinges, a door. There was no need of a window, for light and air found ready access through the door ways and cracks, and down through the wide chimney. A pane of glass was a luxury as yet unknown to this primitive life. Around and near the house was a cleared patch of land containing several acres enclosed with a straight stake fence of cedar rails, and by short cross fences divided into a yard immediately about the cabin; rearward of this a garden, and a young orchard of peach, apple, pear, and plum trees.

^E.B. Long (6 June 2012). Civil War Day by Day. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 1406. ISBN978-0-307-81904-8. As to physical characteristics, the average height of the Federal soldier was put at 5 feet, 8​1⁄4 inches.

^William T. Sherman (1875). Memoirs of General William T. Sherman by Himself. 2. Appleton. pp. 12–13. The massacre at Fort Pillow occurred April 12, 1864, and has been the subject of congressional inquiry. No doubt Forrest's men acted like a set of barbarians, shooting down the helpless negro garrison after the fort was in their possession; but I am told that Forrest personally disclaims any active participation in the assault, and that he stopped the firing as soon as he could. I also take it for granted that Forrest did not lead the assault in person, and consequently that he was to the rear, out of sight if not of hearing at the time, and I was told by hundreds of our men, who were at various times prisoners in Forrest's possession, that he was usually very kind to them. He had a desperate set of fellows under him, and at that very time there is no doubt the feeling of the Southern people was fearfully savage on this very point of our making soldiers out of their late slaves, and Forrest may have shared the feeling.

^Ulysses Simpson Grant (1895). Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Sampson Low. p. 417. These troops fought bravely, but were overpowered. I will leave Forrest in his dispatches to tell what he did with them. " The river was dyed," he says, " with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners." Subsequently Forrest made a report in which he left out the part which shocks humanity to read.

^ ab"Death of Gen. Forrest". New York Times. October 30, 1877. Retrieved 28 February 2018. It is in connection with one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded massacres that ever disgraced civilized warfare that his name will for ever be inseparably associated. "Fort Pillow Forrest" was the title which the deed conferred upon him, and by this he will be remembered by the present generation, and by it he will pass into history. The massacre occurred on April 12, 1864. Fort Pillow is 65 miles above Memphis, and its capture was effected during Forrest's celebrated raid through Tennessee, a State which was at the time practically in possession of the Union forces. ...Forrest reported his own loss at 20 killed and 60 wounded; and states that he buried 228 Federals on the evening of the assault. Yet in the face of this he claimed that the Fort Pillow capture was "a bloody victory, only made a massacre by dastardly Yankee reporters". The news of the massacre aroused the whole country to a paroxysm of horror and fury.

^"John W. Morton Passes Away in Shelby". The Tennessean. November 21, 1914. pp. 1–2. Retrieved September 25, 2016 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)). To Captain Morton came the peculiar distinction of having organized that branch of the Ku Klux Klan which operated in Nashville and the adjacent territory, but a more signal honor was his when he performed the ceremonies which initiated Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest into the mysterious ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.

^"Gate Schedule", El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Texas, p. 8, February 22, 1975, the gate station established on Forrest road is another step in the implementation of a phased traffic control and security program announced last month at Fort Bliss. The Forrest road site was selected for the first of the several gate stations